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without going into reasons I sold Studio, I had a few extra dollars this month and when MAXON had their 30% off sale I picked up Prime and got an additional reduction with sidegrade from Rhino it was an attractive offer, yeah it is a long way from Studio but I feel more comfortable modeling in C4D. when I feel the urge to have dynamics, VFX, cloth, hair etc I can fire up Houdini.

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I’m curious about your decision, since you have houdini. I use both C4D and Houdini but cannot yet replace everything I do in C4D with Houdini. Partially it is because I am not good enough in VEX and Hscript programming, but also because there are things houdini can’t do (sculpting, npr renders where one wants some of the more advanced options that C4D offers). For me, modeling is much quicker in C4D, as things like sweeps give you a reasonable set of options and decent uv’s without having to add a lot of extra nodes and VEX code. Was your experience similar?

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I’m curious about your decision, since you have houdini. I use both C4D and Houdini but cannot yet replace everything I do in C4D with Houdini. Partially it is because I am not good enough in VEX and Hscript programming, but also because there are things houdini can’t do (sculpting, npr renders where one wants some of the more advanced options that C4D offers). For me, modeling is much quicker in C4D, as things like sweeps give you a reasonable set of options and decent uv’s without having to add a lot of extra nodes and VEX code. Was your experience similar?

yeah the same. when I asked about doing something simple like a helix, I was told "just use VEX" (which would be something else to learn), yes VEX is powerful but I don't want to have to use it every time I need a non-standard Houdini tool. for instance I started modeling a Star Wars AT-PT, it was straight forward to get basic shape but then to extrude a poly, I had to go into menu, select extrude, then extrude . . . . repeat process for another poly and their knife tool is a nightmare however the ends results are similar to C4D but a bit clunky getting there and to do something quickly. A positive aspect of Houdini modeling is the procedural method, in C4D, unless you save at each major step, you have to undo then lose things where in most cases in Houdini you just go to that node make the change and it propagates throughout the rest of the nodes. For hard surface modeling, C4D is by far the better choice.

Modeling in Houdini requires a lot more forethought and planning than in C4D. I do believe SideFX is starting to make inroads into modeling tools (nodes) but their bread and butter is VFX as is the bulk of their users.

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Interesting that you bring up a helix in Houdini. Prior to Houdini 16, one had to write a VEX expression. Now it is easier, but still very unintuitive. The way one does this without VEX in Houdini is start with a line and make sure that there are lots of points (start with 100, not the default of 2), add an AttributeExpression and change "self" to "helix". Then ..... nothing happens. One has to click the little icon to the right of the VEX expression box and then "height", "turns", and "radius" show up. They need to be changed from their default of all zeros. But that is just the beginning, because if you use this for a sweep with a circle, it will have no UV coordinates. So there are a few more nodes you need to add to create reasonable UV mapping (and they are not obvious). I posted a solution on the SideFX Houdini Technical Forum recently, so one can see how complicated this is. The reason I mention this in a C4D forum is that people who believe that Houdini is a reasonable substitution for C4D and more powerful have no idea how complex even simple things in Houdini can get. I would not touch Houdini unless I were willing to get fairly deep into VEX programming, if I wanted production quality renders.

The good thing about procedural modeling is that you can reuse all this when you figure out how to do this correctly, as all the "steps" (nodes) are saved.

I agree with you that everything is easier in C4D, unless you hit the ceiling. The positive to procedural modeling is that you have amazing control of attributes, point positions, etc and it is particularly strong in cloning (various "copy to" nodes). For mograph type work, I actually find it both easier and more powerful than C4D. For basic modeling, Houdini can be a headache. Even shaders can require some programming in Houdini. For the fun of it, make the two Houdini toon shader nodes editable and see how complicated they are behind the scenes.

There were a few people a while back that got disgusted with C4D and said they were planning to move completely to Houdini. For those doing VFX, I can see that as a good option, but for other 3D artists, I really wonder how that is going.

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Just curious since this is somewhat related to modeling…does C4D have an Auto-UV function that works well for complex objects (say for instance photoscans)? Just wondering since UV is something that I've been getting into a lot more recently.

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Just curious since this is somewhat related to modeling…does C4D have an Auto-UV function that works well for complex objects (say for instance photoscans)? Just wondering since UV is something that I've been getting into a lot more recently.